New Hampshire Statesman

The Poet's Corner.

Longfellow's Palingenesis:

[In the "Atlantic Monthly" for July we find the following poem—as different from most poems, in its music and meaning, as the playing of a full band in a funeral march from the playing of a common drum.]—Home Journal.

I lay upon the headland-height, and listened
To the incessant sobbing of the sea
In caverns under me,
And watched the waves that tossed and fled, and glistened,
Until the rolling meadows of the sea
Melted away in mist.

Then, suddenly, as one from sleep, I started;
For round about me all the sunny capes
Seemed peopled with the shapes
Of those whom I had known in days departed,
Appareled in the loveliness which gleams
On faces seen in dreams.

A moment only, and the light and glory
Faded away, and the disconsolate shore
Stood lonely as before;
And the wild roses of the promontory
Around me shuddered in the wind, and shed
Their petals of pale red.

There was an old belief that in the embers
Of all things their primordial form exists,
And cunning alchemists
Could recreate the rose with all its members
From its own ashes, but without the bloom,
Without the lost perfume.

Ah, me! what wonder-working, occult science
Can from the ashes in our hearts once more
The rose of youth restore?
What craft of alchemy can bid defiance
To time, and change, and for a single hour
Renew this phantom flower?

"Oh, give me back," I cried, "the vanished splendors,
The breath of morn and the exultant strife,
When the swift stream of life
Bounds o'er its rocky channel, and surrenders
The pond, with all its lilies, for the leap
Into the unknown deep!"

And the sea answered, with a lamentation,
Like some old prophet wailing, and it said,
"Alas! thy youth is dead!
It breathes no more, its heart has no pulsation,
In the dark places with the dead of old,
It lives for ever cold!"

Then said I, "From its consecrated cerements
I will not drag this sacred dust again,
Only to give me pain;
But, still remembering all the lost endearments,
Go on my way, like one who looks before,
And turns to weep no more.

Into what land of harvests, what plantations
Bright with autumnal foliage and the glow
Of sunsets burning low:
Beneath what midnight skies, whose constellations
Light up the spacious avenues between
This world and the unseen:

Amid what friendly greetings and caresses,
What households, though not alien, yet not mine,
What bowers of rest divine:
To what temptations in lone wilderness,
What famine of the heart, what pain and loss,
The bearing of what cross:

I do not know; nor will I vainly question
Those pages of the mystic book which hold
The story still untold,
But without rash conjecture or suggestion
Turn its last leaves in reverence and good heed,
Until "The End" I read.